Lesson 2 of 8
Setting up your account, and the two things you're connecting
Create your free Zapier account and get the two apps ready: the form that catches the enquiry and the tools that reply and record it. Ten minutes, no card needed.
Before you build anything, you need the workshop set up: one Zapier account, and the apps it is going to connect. This lesson is short on purpose. Ten minutes here and lesson three starts building for real.
Create your Zapier account
Go to zapier.com and sign up with your email or your Google account. The free plan is genuinely enough for this whole course and for a good while after it, so do not reach for your card.
Once you are in, you will land on the Zapier dashboard. The button you want is usually top-right and says Create Zap or + Create. That is where every automation in this course starts. Have a look around for thirty seconds, but do not click into anything yet, lesson three is where the real building starts.
The two things you’re connecting
Every automation in this course is one form and two places that reply. Here is what each one is and why we picked it.
The trigger: your contact form. If your website is built on Squarespace, Wix, WordPress or a similar platform, Zapier very likely has a direct connection to it already, search for your platform’s name inside Zapier and you will usually find it. If you are not sure, or you would rather follow along today without touching your live website, use a free Google Form instead. Go to forms.google.com, create a new blank form, and add three fields: Name, Email, and a short dropdown called “What can we help with?” with a couple of options like “Get a quote” and “Just a question”. That five-minute form stands in for your real contact form for the rest of this course, and you can point the same automation at your actual website form later once you have built it once and understand the shape.
The actions: Gmail and Google Sheets. We reply through Gmail (or “Email by Zapier” if you would rather not connect your own inbox for now), and we record every enquiry in a Google Sheet. Both are free, both are things most businesses already have a login for, and both connect to Zapier in a couple of clicks. Open a blank Google Sheet now and give it a name like “Enquiry follow-up list”, with column headers across the top row: Name, Email, Enquiry, Date. Leave it empty otherwise, Zapier will fill it in for you from lesson five onward.
Connecting an account: the one idea worth understanding
Whenever Zapier asks you to “Connect an account”, here is what is actually happening. You are giving Zapier permission to act on your behalf inside that app, sending an email as you, or adding a row to a sheet you own, nothing more. It is the same permission screen you have seen a hundred times when an app asks to sign in with Google. Read what it is asking for, click allow, and it remembers the connection for every future Zap, you only do it once per app.
What good looks like before lesson three
You should have: a Zapier account open in one tab, a form ready (your website’s or the quick Google Form), and a Google Sheet with headers waiting. That is the whole workshop. Next: building the trigger, the moment that starts everything off.